The Recrefest conference revealed a talent acquisition landscape increasingly dominated by AI, but with a noticeable decline in overall industry presence and innovation, alongside emerging concerns about an aging workforce and candidate fraud.
This past week, I had a chance to attend
Recrefest here in Nashville, which is a
conference of recruiting and talent
acquisition. It's basically a an
industry event where a bunch of
recruiters, talent acquisition folks,
and companies get together and talk
about where things are heading in the
market. I like to attend this every year
to get an idea of how hiring is
evolving, looking for emerging trends,
and of course, sharing them directly
with you so you can stay one step ahead
of the competition. So, if this kind of
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don't miss any future content. So the
lay of this thing is basically there's a
bunch of keynote speakers, a bunch of
breakout rooms and a bunch of vendors.
So it's like talent acquisition
companies um a lot of ATS or applicant
tracking system companies are there a
lot of emerging technology and then um
you know some major employers. My
overall impressions this year versus
last year is that the that the
conference attendance actually seemed
pretty light. A lot of the major
employers that were there last year like
Indeed and uh like Greenhouse ATS
systems, a few few big companies were
actually not in attendance this year.
They didn't they didn't have a booth.
They didn't have any sponsorship or
anything. So I thought that that was
really interesting and there there
seemed to be my guess was probably 30
maybe even 40% less people than years
previous. So I don't know if this is an
indication of companies scaling back on
hiring activities and really not trying
to be a big presence in the market. In
fact, most of the vendors were pretty
small. A lot of them were startup type
companies that were trying to solve
similar things. And I think that that
was the first major trend that I saw. So
less people, less overall participation.
Companies are not sending their people
to these things as much, which might be
an indication of corporate spend, but a
lot of the companies that were there in
particular, I'm talking about vendors
and some of the pres presenters, the
talk of the town was AI. And I'm sure
that's of no surprise to just about
anybody. It seems like every single
product that's coming out now has an AI
label slapped on it. And the problems
that they're all trying to solve seem to
me to be very repetitive and redundant.
And I didn't see a whole lot of
innovation. So I don't know if this is
an indicator, a positive indicator or a
neutral or a negative indicator. But
basically what I saw is these vendors
trying to replace recruiters with AI
automation, which is kind of an
interesting target audience because
they're they're trying to market their
services to talent acquisition. So more
and more companies are starting to
embrace AI as part of their talent
acquisition strategy. So expect to see
more outreach done by a robot,
potentially first round interviews done
by robots or these, you know, one-way
interviews. So I think we're going to
see an increase in that. And then the
candidate sourcing is increasingly being
done by AI. Used to not be this way, but
now they're increasingly doing a lot of
the sourcing and a lot of unfortunately
a lot of the ranking. Now there's a
two-edged sword here with the ranking of
a candidate in AI. Suppose you have a
thousand applications. A recruiter is
not going to make it through all
thousand applications. They may only get
through a 100red or 200 of them till
they find a slate of candidates that
they like and then they're going to go
and screen them and then submit the ones
that they like best to the hiring teams.
The rest of the candidates are basically
in a holding pattern until those first
group of candidates move through their
process because the recruiters got to go
move on to other roles.
What this AI sourcing at least this is
what these companies are telling us what
they're promising is that this new
technology will actively scan all
applicants. So you'll in theory get seen
but probably not by human eyes. And then
they would pre-screen. In some cases
you'd actually have an interview with
them. So everybody would get an
interview which again I don't know if I
like that or not but nonetheless
everybody would get an interview and
then you would get submitted or at least
put into a certain bucket. So the AI is
not making a decision per se, but rather
it's assigning a ranking, a weight, so
to speak, for you based on what the job
position is is looking for, what the
what the company has put out as a as a
requirement. The recruiters can then
look at the candidates who are flagged
as a higher ranking and then that's in
theory where they would start their
recruiting efforts. So that's a lot of
what I heard in the AI space is mainly
that component. Otherwise, the
innovation just really wasn't there. I
didn't see anything that was new and
earthshattering. In fact, it just seemed
to be repackaging of the same AI tools
I've been hearing about for the last 2
or 3 years. So, I wonder if we're
hitting kind of a on the bell curve, the
kind of a peak of the bell curve of AI
slop and companies just throwing
everything out, throwing an AI wrapper
on on on something and then kind of
having it become irrelevant. And I I
feel like a lot of the companies, so you
had you had the vendors who were kind of
pushing all this stuff, but a lot of the
companies themselves, the actual
companies were hiring people, didn't
really seem to be pushing the AI thing
as much. And there was some discussion
around how AI would work in the hiring
process and whether or not companies
minded if if candidates used it. And I
think that that was another big theme
that came out of this is companies
aren't necessarily didn't seem like they
were caring all that much if you used an
AI generated resume for example so long
as it was still authentic that you
weren't just putting in fake information
spitting out fake information back and
it wasn't the same as everybody else's
because that's the one thing that I was
I learned is that their ability to check
and track what's going on in their
applicant pool is actually pretty
limited. They don't have great detection
tools. And I actually asked that
question very specifically. Can you tell
if a resume is generated by AI or if the
application is generated by AI? And the
overall consensus for multiple companies
that I spoke to and some applicant
tracking companies is that they actually
don't have great detection tools to
date. There are some companies that are
trying to figure that that out. But when
I asked them to kind of explain how
their algorithm looked at résumés and
determined certain things, suppose you
applied for a job without using AI, but
the system still thinks that you did and
assigned you a certain status or a
certain rating, maybe a little
suspicious application profile setting.
You could likely discriminate. I feel
like this opens up a lot of a big can of
worms. And so some of these companies
hadn't really thought through that very
well. And I'm I'm curious if larger
companies will become more sophisticated
with that and what the potential legal
implications are. So I wasn't really
hearing a clear
guidance from the companies on whether
or not they use AI detection tools. In
in fact, I was hearing that there wasn't
really much that they could do to even
detect it. Kind of all boiled back to
the eyeball test. It was very obvious to
a lot of the hiring managers when
somebody would use an AI tool to help
them with their process. And it was
probably more so around like AI
interviewing, this uh the roboticness of
somebody looking off screen. That was
one of the things that came up. If
you're looking off screen and reading
off of prompts and these kind of like
auto automated AI tools that help you
with interviewing, that was something
that was very specifically called out
and pretty much unanimously if they if
they they almost always knew when you
were doing that. And if you would do
that, you would be immediately
disqualified. But it didn't seem like
they had as much an issue with the AI
generated resume. So, so long as what
was on the resume was still accurate.
So, that was good news. Uh, as far as I
was concerned,
one of the other things that they were
having an issue with is company fraud.
That was kind one of the big big topics
um on some of the breakout sessions was
people applying for jobs and they're not
who they say they are. And a lot of
times this is going to be around
immigration so around you know visas
etc. But a lot of people basically
gaming the system. So there are some
companies who are looking more and more
into detection tools for fraud which is
not necessarily the same as AI like
using AI on your on your on your um uh
applications but rather creating fake
profiles altogether to defraud
companies. That's apparently becoming a
much bigger thing. So that was another
major push by several corporations to
try to combat this fraud issue that's
coming up. I also found there's more and
more companies moving toward more of an
emphasis of the soft skills versus
technical skills in that the technical
skills can be assessed through an
assessment process. You know, there's
there's usually assessment there, but
really where companies seem to be moving
is putting more emphasis onto soft
skills. The good news is about this is
softskll interviewing is something that
you can learn and you can master. And so
when I was listening to them talking
about the problems and how they're
approaching it through basically just
behavior-based interviewing, they're
starting to become much more focused on
the soft skills versus the technical
skills. So I thought that that was a
positive. But it operates under the
assumption that you already have the
technical skills in place. So you may
expect to have a technical assessment on
some level, but as you get into speaking
with humans, you're likely going to be
really focused on the soft side of
things. Another big issue that was
discussed is the aging workforce. And I
think that this is something that
companies are struggling to deal with with
with
the baby boomer generation is in mass
moving out of the workplace. And in
fact, even some Gen Xers are starting to
re get to retirement age. And there's a
big bubble of people who are leaving the
workforce with not as many people
replacing them. Now, they also this kind
of this big picture is you're you're
replacing a lot of these entry-level
jobs with automation and and AI and
basically eliminating. So, the the Gen Z
generation is finding it very difficult
to get a footing in jobs. At the same
time, companies are complaining that or
were worrying about not having enough
bench strength. So, there are some
companies out there thinking about this
problem because we're going to have a
very real labor shortage. Now, I think
the labor market is going to look
different than it did a few years ago. I
think as automation comes in, and that's
one of the things that they identified
with the Gen Z group is that they're
more quick to use automation and tools.
But what we're seeing is a mass exodus
of a bigger generation moving out of the
market and leaving a void. Now, it's
going to be really fascinating to see
how companies manage this if they're
laying off everybody and they're making
it so hard to get entry- level jobs
because there's going to be no bench
strength. So, I think that's something
to pay close attention to as we go
forward. Will we see an increase in the
number of entry-level positions to start
building bench strength even though
these are the exact roles that companies
are targeting for AI? And one of the
last themes that I found is that
companies are starting to look
increasingly at other ways to source
candidates and the potential that
LinkedIn is starting to mature. It's
it's actually a matured company back in
2022. It reached its peak of users and
it seems to be heading in a little bit
of a directionless future. So look for
companies to increasingly be sourcing
candidates outside of LinkedIn. So you
should start asking yourself that
question, where can I be found if not on
LinkedIn? and we'll be talking more
about that on this channel as well. So,
these are some of the major trends
coming out of the talent acquisition
industry as a whole. And I think if we
know this, we can use it to our
advantage to start positioning ourselves
for tomorrow. Again, I didn't hear any
major changes. In fact, I felt like last
year there was a bigger push for AI than
it is this year. And this year, it seems
like, I hate to say this, but it seems
like a lot of the bottom feeders are
just jumping on the bandwagon with AI,
slapping AI on the names of their
products and throwing AI tools in that
really don't add any bonafide value. And
I think that that's probably in general
what we're seeing with the AI market as
a whole. I wonder if we're we've hit a
point of inflection and are these AI
tools as revolutionary as ones promised?
As of right now, I'm just not seeing it.
I wonder if we're in a bubble and things
could change. But I will keep paying
attention to the market. As always,
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